arXiv subjects

Eve Tsybina

Publications and source records attributed to Eve Tsybina.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Fast Relax-and-Round Unit Commitment with Topological Constraints

Recent developments in the US knowledge economy have created a significant growth in datacenter loads, with two major consequences for power generation. First, to compensate for growth in load, datacenters are encouraged to bring their own generating units. Second, in search of the remaining pools of dispatchable generation, utilities are increasingly turning to subtransmission and distribution level generating assets. Coupled with increasing loads and the resulting tighter grid conditions, both trends are likely to create a need to commit a large number of localized generating units under grid constraints. We propose an extension of Relax-and- Round Unit Commitment (RRUC) that is capable of committing generating units for larger problems faster than conventional methods, while staying within intertemporal and spatial MVA constraints. We demonstrate the performance of RRUC using synthetic congestible test systems ranging from 100 to 20,000 buses. RRUC consistently finds low cost solutions, independent of the problem size, and its run time increases sub-quadratically in the number of buses. RRUC can solve the 100 bus system in less than a second and the 20,000 bus system 7 minutes. In contrast, a leading state of the art solver cannot find a feasible solution to the 100 bus system in 15 minutes.

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arXiv2026

Fast Relax-and-Round Unit Commitment with Economic Horizons

The US energy system is increasingly under pressure to serve expanding data loads and to accommodate a larger number of generating units with varying technologies and own- ership structures. Therefore, developing new unit commitment methods remains a priority for reliable and affordable grid operations. We expand our novel computational method for unit commitment (UC) to include ramping constraints and long- horizon planning and provide a theoretical bound on its error. We introduce a fast novel algorithm to commit hydro-generators. We solve problems with thousands of generators at 5-minute market intervals. We show that our method can solve UC problems with over 20,000 generators in approximately 10 seconds on commodity hardware and that an increased planning horizon leads to sizable operational cost savings. We attain this runtime improvement by introducing a heuristic tailored for UC problems. Our method can be implemented using existing continuous optimization solvers and adapted for different applications. We prove a bound on the error of these solvers and show that it vanishes (in relative terms) as the problem becomes larger. We also introduce a fast and accurate hydro UC algorithm. Combined, these algorithms would allow an operator to make horizon-aware economic decisions for large systems with hydro units.

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arXiv2026

Agentic Artificial Intelligence for Power Systems: Strategies to Identify and Close Capability Gaps

The rapid expansion of AI-driven information infrastructure, particularly data centers, is placing unprecedented pressure on power systems and accelerating the pace at which new assets must interconnect with the grid. As bulk transmission expansion rolls out slowly, new loads and generation are increasingly deployed within existing network constraints. Agentic AI is urgently needed to automate the numerous and repetitive connection processes, but its maturity has not been systematically validated on complex tasks and large-scale systems. We replicate the current state of the art in agentic AI for power systems planning and evaluate it against a structured suite of nodal planning problems spanning six levels of task complexity and four grid scales. We find that only the two lowest complexity levels are solvable on some of the test grid sizes, and identify the specific capability upgrades required to close this gap. Adopting stricter testing protocols and reproducible evaluation benchmarks is essential for assessing both genuine progress and the operational readiness of agentic AI.

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arXiv2026

Hidden Economic Consequences of Adapting to Fast Ramping Datacenter Loads

Artificial intelligence workloads are driving the rapid expansion of datacenter infrastructure, which imposes substantial stress on the US energy system. While high peak electricity prices are an anticipated outcome, measurable under peak hour simulations, the high off peak prices are a significantly underestimated threat. We simulate different ramping conditions on a congestible 5000-bus system, based on a modified IEEE 118-bus grid, to show that, in the presence of fast ramping loads and slow ramping generation, datacenters can aggravate latent load pockets. This results in unexpectedly high system costs during periods outside of datacenter peak. We test the datacenter effects using two distinct load conditions. We find that in the system coincident peak, coupled simulations result in up to 100% loading of slow expensive units, with an average marginal cost increase of 8%. These findings are of extreme importance as they reveal the hidden costs of preventively ramping slow generation in anticipation of datacenter load changes.

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arXiv2026

Geospatial sensitivity of transmission-constrained ACOPF to generator retirement

The US faces a growing resource adequacy challenge: new loads are being added at unprecedented scale while aging generating assets are being retired. In transmission-constrained grids, it is difficult to determine which units can be safely retired and which cannot be retired and instead require lifetime extensions until new generation can be built. Historically, this analysis was prohibitively time consuming. Transmission-constrained AC optimal power flow (ACOPF) is computationally intensive, and a thorough comparison and prioritization of generators could require hundreds or thousands of scenarios. We present an HPC-enabled framework that enables computation and geospatial mapping of the effects of generator retirement in terms of voltage magnitude and angle effects in the steady state. Specifically, our framework detects the effects of generator retirement using a simple k-nearest-neighbors model and a voltage-class-adjusted neighbor model. We demonstrate the results on over 8,000 generator retirement scenarios for a 70,000-bus transmission-constrained synthetic grid.

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arXiv2026

HPC-Enabled Generator Importance Assessment for RTO-Scale Resource Adequacy Planning

Modern power systems are increasingly under stress as aging assets approach retirement and load growth outpaces new generation construction. The severity of this challenge varies by region: in the EU, the transmission grid can partially compensate for local generation shortfalls, while in the US, generation tends to be more localized, making retirements harder to offset. Retirement of generation has consequences for system reserves, fuel supply chain, and public health. We present an high-performance computing (HPC) framework for rapidly assessing the grid importance of individual generating units and ranking them by primary fuel type, operating cost, or grid impact. Historically, such studies were computationally intensive and therefore conducted infrequently. This work demonstrates that such assessments can be completed in minutes, enabling planners to evaluate a much broader range of generation portfolio scenarios than was previously possible.

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arXiv2026

Fast Relax-and-Round Unit Commitment with Sub-hourly Mechanical and Ramp Constraints

We propose a novel computational method for unit commitment UC, which does not require linearized approximation and provides several orders of magnitude performance improvement over current state-of-the-art. The performance improvement is achieved by introducing a heuristic tailored for UC problems. The method can be implemented using existing continuous optimization solvers and adapted for different applications. We demonstrate value of the new method in examples of advanced UC analyses at the scale where use of current state-of-the-art tools is infeasible. We expect that the capability demonstrated in this paper will be critical to address emerging power systems challenges with more volatile large loads, such as data centers, and generation that is composed of larger number of smaller units, including significant behind-the-meter generation.

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arXiv2026

A Fast Relax-and-Round Approach to Unit Commitment for Data Center Own Generation

The rapid growth of data centers increasingly requires data center operators to "bring own generation" to complement the available utility power plants to supply all or part of data center load. This practice sharply increases the number of generators on the bulk power system and shifts operational focus toward fuel costs rather than traditional startup and runtime constraints. Conventional mixed-integer unit commitment formulations are not well suited for systems with thousands of flexible, fast-cycling units. We propose a unit commitment formulation that relaxes binary commitment decisions by allowing generators to be fractionally on, enabling the use of algorithms for continuous solvers. We then use a rounding approach to get a feasible unit commitment. For a 276-unit system, solution time decreases from 10 hours to less than a second, with no accuracy degradation. Our approach scales with no issues to tens of thousands of generators, which allows solving problems on the scale of the major North America interconnections. The bulk of computation is parallel and GPU compatible, enabling further acceleration in future work.

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arXiv2021

The Effect of Prosumer Duality on Power Market: Evidence from the Cournot Model

Distributed energy resources behind the meter and automation systems enable traditional electricity consumers to become prosumers (producers/consumers) that can participate in peer-to-peer exchange of electricity and in retail electricity markets. Emerging prosumers can provide benefits to the system by exchanging energy and energy-related services. More importantly, they can do so in a more honest and more competitive way than the traditional producer/consumer systems. We extend the traditional Cournot model to show that the dual nature of prosumers can lead to more competitive behavior under a game theoretic scenario. We show that best response supply quantities of a prosumer are usually closer to the competitive level compared to those of a producer.

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